Spire Technologies is reengineering HR with its robots

This fast growing tech company believes that the time for AI has come to play the biggest disruptor in HR space.Chhavi Tyagi | ET Online | Updated: November 15, 2016, 13:06 IST

What will happen when robots replace you at your workplace? What happens when HR manned with hiring and recruiting is replaced by a robot? In a rapidly evolving technological work, artificial intelligence or (AI) has touched various facets of our workplace, but there is a quiet distrust among the HR community about the rise of the machines.

It would then, appear a company that offers AI solutions in the HR space would find the going tough. Spire Technologies, however, seems to have bucked the trend and is in fact one of the fastest growing tech companies in India.

The company offers contextual artificial intelligence (AI) technology product (Spire TalentSHIP) for HR purposes like talent acquisition, social recruiting, social CRM deployment and development. The product claims to drive disruption through increasing efficiency and decreasing the cost of an enterprise through its deep learning AI systems.

"It takes 10 recruiters a week to just shortlist candidates for a position from a database of 2,00,000 resumes. Our contextual search and map system takes only 60 seconds to give you the names of five candidates with 95% probability that you will recruit one out of those five," explains Neeraj Sanan, chief marketing officer of Spire Technologies.

The process, claims Sanan, is not only fast and efficient, but also completely free of human bias. Sanan further claims that while other products provide 5-15% accuracy of procedure, Spire TalentSHIP functions with 90% accuracy in contextual search and a 75% in contextual mapping.The tech company has been operating since the last 24 months, but it is only in the last 12 months that AI has been garnering attention and therefore, adoption has increased.

"It takes some time for the ecosystem to realise the importance of disruptive technology, but now the world is waking up to the reality of AI. AI will disrupt and change the way HR functions and all the current cutting-edge technology in prevalence is going to disappear. This technology is going to grow and since we are one of the few early entrants we will get our fair share of growth," says Sanan.Growing at a fast clip, Spire is poised to take advantage of a world which is slowly, but steadily accepting the impact and understanding the efficiencies of an AI-based platform. While the US, being the frontrunner in the tech world, is the primary market for Spire, many businesses in India are also keen to take advantage of disruptive technologies like Spire TalentSHIP.

Robots are coming for you

However, mass adoption is still a long dream. Sanan explains that it takes anywhere between 7-10 months to get a client on board and there are several who drop out during the process.

"People understand the impact and the utility, but there are challenges in driving adoption. Many people have a sense of loss of power, domain recognition and even jobs. It is difficult to sell AI, it is a subject which everybody wants to talk about, but adoption is tricky," says Sanan.This is the reason why the management of Spire ensures that their potential clients have a global mindset - a mindset, which Sanan explains, goes a long way in making innovation acceptable. Sanan says that Spire ensures that their prospective clients have strength of minimum 5,000 employees and a global mindset before they approach the negotiation table.

"Geographical boundaries do not define the scope of a technology company like ours. It is the mindset. Our company is disruption itself and product an innovation. We are an above average premium product and our deals run into millions of dollars. Therefore, a client has a lot to consider before they adopt our products. Our first customers were real visionaries," says Sanan.

While Spire currently operates in the HR space, it claims its product is domain agnostic and can be applied to diverse functions like risk analysis, relationship building, etc.

"Anything which cannot be defined in numbers, but need qualitative text to define is our domain. Textual analytics can traditionally be only done by humans but we have taught machines to give context to the text. Future products may include domains beyond HR," says Sanan.

Deloitte estimates that HR tech is a $17 billion market, growing at a rate of around 30% annually. More importantly, world technological pioneers like Elon Musk have made AI the talk of the town. Given all these, Spire Technologies is in an interesting space and claims to have its technology tuned and product perfected to meet the incoming demand.